The next step in painting is to do the Tuscan red panels. Black Cat Decals, who make the decal set I'm using, makes a companion set of Tuscan panels...
However, this loco was scaled down from HO scale and so the fine details are REALLY fine, and I'm concerned that they will disappear under the paint and decals, so I'm trying to all of the colour decoration with very thin coats of paint.
For the tender, I'm very lucky in that the designer actually counted the rivets when he drew this model, so I was able to do the same.
I couldn't find a decent picture of the tender in my modelling time period, but I did find a very good one of it later in her career, and figured it looked the same.
I cut small strips of tale and located them at where I thought the outside edges of the panel would be...
I then measured the length and width. I placed a long piece of Tamiya tape on a piece of glass, and cut one edge with my straight edge to be sure I was starting with perfect straight edge. After this I measure the width and cut the other side off. Now I had a long piece of tape the height of my panel which would allow me to make multiple faster, and yield enough to make some mistakes along the way while cutting them.
I needed to cut repeatable, rounded corners on all of these panels. To do this I found an etched fret with rounded corners and compared ot to my decal set. It turns out my BLMA #80 lift rings were perfect.
I aligned the fret with the first corner and using a new blade, gently pulled it around the corner, and finished half way through the strip. Then I removed the waste at that corner revealing my cut corner....
I flipped the template over and aligned it with the edge I just cut and finished the next corner...
Next I used my length measurement to make a small cut in the centre at the other end of the panel. i pushed that out a bit with the knife to reveal the cut edge that I could then use to align the fret...
I repeated the same process at the other end and after a couple of mistakes, ended up with two useable panels...
The rejected panel in the middle would be used to make the smaller cab panels.
For this panel I made the size by eye using the proportions of the cab and decal as a guide. Looking only at the height of the panal at this, I put two pieces of tape on the side of the cab and repositioned them until I felt it looked right. I used some cab numbers cut from the decal set to assist.
For the width of the panel I used the same procedure.
At this point I had two pieces of tape to use as templates for the height and width of the cab panel. I put the height tape at each end of my mask, made a mark with my knife, and finished the cut with the straight edge. I thin used the fret in the same way as before and cut the four corners.
Next up, Tuscan paint!
